David Meyler had only been a Sunderland first-teamer for five months when he suffered the injury which ruined his career and put paid to a move to the club he supported as a boy, Liverpool.

Even the list of problems Meyler suffered 37 minutes into a 1-0 defeat to Manchester United in May 2010 is not for the faint-hearted.

“I did my cruciate, lateral, medial (ligaments), ripped bone off my kneecap and snapped, I’m going to say, my bicep femoris – the side of your knee that allows it all to move, I ripped that off so it had to be reattached,” he told Off the Ball.

It stopped Meyler achieving his potential but not captaining his country, playing in the FA Cup final, winning two promotions to the Premier League and scoring at Anfield. Playing once more was a huge achievement, never mind the 237 times he did.

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“I went in to tackle Patrice Evra and he basically just leant across me and my knee just went like a pretzel, I just fell on to it and made a complete mess of it,” he recalled.

“I’d never had a bad injury and I remember the physio came running on asking, ‘Are you okay?’

“I said, ‘I’ve collided knees, give me a minute and I’ll be all right, just get me to the sideline.’

“He tested everything and basically they pull the front of your kneecap out to test your cruciate and he said mine came out about a metre.

“You could probably put a case for me being too eager going for the ball. It was my first time playing against Man United.

“The surgeon told me I’d never play again and even he said, ‘If you were to make a miraculous recovery it’ll be 18 to 24 months before you play.’”

Meyler only made his Sunderland debut, aged 20, the previous Christmas, in a 2-2 draw at Blackburn Rovers. It was the first of 11 appearances that season including starts against Chelsea, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur. He had been due to be in the Republic of Ireland squad for the first time that summer.

Meyler quickly recovered but only made five more appearances before another cruciate problem with the same knee when Liverpool wanted to buy him.

“It took me eight months to get playing but then I did my cruciate again,” said Meyler. The second injury came at Aston Villa in January 2011.

The obvious question is whether he rushed back too soon.

“ Steve Bruce was the manager, Dave Binningsley was the physio, neither one of them rushed me,” he insisted.

“The second time was just a freak incident where I’d gone to put my leg in the air and I’d gone down on it – same leg.

“The second time was nowhere near as bad as the first but (my surgeon) joked saying you’ll be back before your original first date of 18, 24 months.”

Meyler later discovered the second injury stopped him getting his dream transfer.

“I went to the Champions League final in Madrid (last summer),” he recalled.

“So I went with Jordan (Henderson)’s family but I met King Kenny (Dalglish) after.

“Kenny was actually going to sign me when he signed Jordan for Liverpool but I’d done my cruciate. He talks about it in his book.

“He said, ‘What could have been...’

“I said, ‘Let’s not get it started now’.”

Meyler returned from his second injury at home to West Bromwich Albion in October 2011. He made 25 Premier League appearances for Sunderland and had spells at Hull City, Reading and Coventry City before retiring aged 30 last month, but was never the same.

“I spent the next seven, eight months recovering, playing reserve games, got back, then Steve Bruce unfortunately got sacked and that’s when Martin (O’Neill) took over,” he said. “People say to me, ‘You didn’t play much for Martin at Sunderland’. The problem was Martin needed me 100 per cent ready to go.

“I probably needed two months of 30 minutes here, 40 minutes there, an hour there. It’s the Premier League, managers don’t have time to be giving young fellas games here and there, and there is only so much that you can get out of reserve games.

“It’s hard because my mum, dad and wife never really understood the extent of it. My dad, to be fair to him, reckons he did from the start.

“My wife thinks that it was all in my head, she thought: ‘You’re fine, you train and you play...’